Dada Africa, Non-Western Sources and Influences

Exhibition organised in Paris by the Rietberg Museum Zurich and the Berlinische Galerie Berlin, in conjunction with the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie.

Dada, a prolific and subversive art movement, first emerged in Zurich during the First World War, and then spread to centres such as Berlin, Paris and New York. Through their new works – sound poems, collage, performance – the Dada artists question Western society struggling with the first World War, while appropriating the cultural and artistic forms of non-western cultures such as Africa, Oceania and America.
The Musée de l’Orangerie is presenting an exhibition on these exchanges with African, American Indian and Asian works alongside those of the Dadaists - Hanna Höch, Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Raoul Haussmann, Man Ray and Picabia, among others.

The Dada soirées will feature archive material of films of dance, sound documents, music, revealing the diversity, inventiveness and radical nature of Dada productions – textiles, graphics, posters, assemblages, wooden reliefs, dolls and puppets – in relation to the strange beauty and rarity of the non-western works: a Hemba statue and Makonde mask from Africa, a Hannya mask from Japan, the prow of a Maori pirogue...
As the home of the Jean Walter - Paul Guillaume collection, the Musée de l’Orangerie is the perfect place for this exhibition. Paul Guillaume, an important dealer in African art, played a leading role in this cultural encounter that took place against a background of hybrids, genre and colonial attitudes.

In counterpoint to the exhibition, the works of two contemporary artists will be presented at the museum:
- two photographs by the artist Athi-Patra Ruga from a performance and a reflection on identity… A Vigil for Mayibuye (from the Exile series), 1915 and The Future White Woman of Azania, 2012
- a collection of works (tapestries, photographs and drawings) by Otobong Nkanga, including two tapestries In Pursuit of Bling, 2014.

Athi-Patra Ruga lives and works in Johannesburg. Exploring the border zones between fashion, performance and contemporary art. Athi-Patra Ruga’s work exhibits and subverts the body in relation to structure, ideology and politics. Bursting with eclectic multicultural references, carnal sensuality and a dislocated undercurrent of humour, his performances, videos, costumes and photographic images create a world where cultural identity is no longer determined by geographical origin, ancestry or biological disposition, but is increasingly becoming a hybrid construct.
Otobong Nkanga, an artist who trained in Nigeria and Paris, lives and works in Antwerp. Her drawings, installations, photographs, performances and sculptures question in different ways the notion of territory and the value accorded to natural resources. In several of her works, Otobong Nkanga reflects metonymically on the different customs and cultural values connected to natural resources, exploring how meaning and function are relative in cultures, and revealing the various roles and histories of these materials, particularly in the context of her own life and memories.

This display was made possible with the support of Fabienne Leclerc / Galerie In Situ, Paris.

General curators
Ralf Burmeister, Head of Artists’ Archives at the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin
Michaela Oberhofer, Curator of African and Oceanic Arts at the Rietberg Museum in Zurich
Esther Tisa Francini, Head of Written Archives and Research from the Rietberg Museum in Zurich

Curators for the exhibition in Paris
Cécile Debray, Chief Heritage Curator, Director of the Musée de l’Orangerie
Cécile Girardeau, curator at the Musée de l’Orangerie
Assisted by Sylphide de Daranyi, Documentary Research Officer, and Valérie Loth, Research Officer at the Musée de l’Orangerie

Dada Paradis
With the Centre Dramatique National Les Tréteaux de France, the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris and the Conservatoire national supérieur d’art dramatique de Paris.
Fridays 8 and 15 December 2017, 12 and 19 January 2018 at 7pm and 8.30pm

Auditorium du musée d'Orsay

Echoing the theme of the exhibition, the Musée d’Orsay auditorium invites you to take a trip into the Paris of the 1920s, where the newcomer, jazz, is driving the capital wild.
The programme gives an insight into what was, more than Dada music as such, the spirit of Dada and its influence on musical works of the period.
Drawn from every register, inspired by non-European music, and particularly by jazz that arrived in Paris with the American troops at the end of the First World War, the artists of this era, like Darius Milhaud, made profound changes to the way music was written and experienced.